Norman Bel Geddes didn’t design a single vehicle that entered production. He didn’t hold down any job with an automaker for more than a few years, and in fact, he much preferred designing theater sets over designing anything else, cars included. Yet he proved immeasurably influential to automotive and transportation design, warranting a new exhibit that traces his career and legacy.

Much like a couple of his contemporaries, Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Bel Geddes envisioned not just snippets of potential futures, but an overarching and unified future where architecture and planned communities integrated with industrial design and transportation. He began to express those ideas in 1927 when, after finding success at stage design and after finding the boxy cars and trucks of the day disappointing, he designed a number of futuristic vehicles, some of the earliest ones to apply engineers’ ideas on streamlining to car bodies here in the States, leading many to label Bel Geddes as the father of the term “streamlining.”

(We should note here that others – most notably Paul Jaray, Edmund Rumpler, and Dennis Burney – had explored streamlining as it applies to automobiles before Bel Geddes, but it was Bel Geddes’s long and flowing lines that brought an aesthetic sense to the field and that set the mold for futuristic car designs for the next few decades.)

As Michael Lamm wrote in Special Interest Autos #40, May-July 1977, those automotive designs caught the attention of Graham-Paige’s Ray Graham, who hired Bel Geddes the following year as a styling consultant and tasked him with designing the Graham-Paige of 1933 and working backwards from that design year by year to allow the company to incrementally work toward Bel Geddes’s radical designs. The onset of the Depression the following year would derail those grand plans, but Bel Geddes stayed on with Graham-Paige until Ray Graham’s death in 1932.

Bel Geddes followed that stint with his 1932 book Horizons, in which he articulated his ideas on automobile design, arguing that engines should drive the car from the rear, that drivers should sit up front and center for a commanding view of the road, and that automobiles should ride on six or eight wheels instead of four, echoing Milton O. Reeves‘s assertions of a couple of decades prior. Along with the book, he built another set of models, which this time caught the attention of Walter P. Chrysler, who in 1933 invited Bel Geddes to submit some proposals for a compact car and some improvements and spin-offs of the Chrysler Airflow.

He followed that contract with work for Autocar (focused on making the company’s trucks look more powerful) and Texaco (designing the Doodlebug Diamond T fuel oil delivery trucks) before approaching Shell in 1937 with a plan to develop his vision for a city of the future, which used superhighways to keep traffic moving through and above cities. While Shell funded Bel Geddes’s model for an advertising campaign, he nevertheless approached General Motors with it, convincing Alfred Sloan to let him develop it for GM’s pavilion at the upcoming 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair.

Though it ended up costing GM $7 million – or as much as $237 million in today’s dollars – the resulting Futurama exhibit proved a hit for GM, with lines snaking around the building waiting for a chance to see Bel Geddes’s elaborately executed vision for the cities and highways of 1960. The layout encompassed an entire acre and included half a million individual buildings, a million individual trees of 13 species, 50,000 cars (all, naturally, rear-engined streamliners with a multitude of wheels), and a 14-lane interstate highway that separated traffic out according to speed and destination while at the same time accommodating urban pedestrian traffic. As Adnan Morshed of the National Air and Space Museum wrote in The Aesthetics of Ascension in Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama:

the Futurama aspired to be the culmination of early-twentieth-century urbanist thinking. (It) prophesied an American utopia regulated by an assortment of cutting-edge technologies: remote-controlled multilane highways, power plants, farms for artificially produced crops, rooftop platforms for individual flying machines and autogyros, and various gadgets, all of which were intended to create an idea built environment and, ultimately, to reform society.

Visitors sat on a conveyor belt and looked down on the spectacle from above, taking an 18-minute narrated tour as if they flew above the landscape. The end of the tour then dropped them off at a full-scale street intersection as envisioned by Bel Geddes, complete with passenger flyovers and GM cars and trucks comprising the “traffic” below. Tens of thousands of visitors took in Bel Geddes’s Futurama every day – estimates range from about 10 million to 25 million overall – making it the fair’s most visited attraction.

“Futurama’s giant model of America in 1960, complete with glass-clad skyscrapers and multilevel superhighways, gave Depression-era Americans genuine hope for a better future within their lifetimes,” Donald Albrecht wrote in Norman Bel Geddes Designs America. “It was Geddes, more than any designer of his era, who created and promoted a dynamic vision of the future with an image that was streamlined, technocratic, and optimistic. Today, as seen in the ‘retro-futurist’ looks of theme parks, animated television programs, and popular novels, Geddes’s vision of the future continues to shape and inspire the twenty-first-century American imagination.”

One would have thought that Bel Geddes would have parlayed such a success into a career in automotive or transportation design, but apart from a two-year contract for Nash, a 1940 design for a streamlined tank, and an assignment to design delivery and sales trucks for IBM, Bel Geddes remained largely involved in theater set design until his death in 1958.

Today, Bel Geddes’s archives reside at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which in the fall of 2012 assembled about 200 of Bel Geddes’s drawings, models, photographs, and films for I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America, an exhibit that, according to the Harry Ransom Center’s blog, “highlights Bel Geddes’s creativity and desire to transform American society through design.” The exhibit then traveled to the Museum of the City of New York from last October through this February and has now gone to the Wolfsonian at Florida International University in Miami Beach.

“Geddes was both a visionary and a pragmatist who had a significant role in shaping not only modern America, but also the nation’s image of itself as leading the way into the future,” Albrecht wrote. “Underlying Geddes’s amazing array of efforts were themes that can be traced throughout his career: his commitments to the power of unfettered imagination and the primacy of the individual, his fascination with nature as a model for imitation, and his belief in the possibility of a utopian future. And Geddes’s showmanship became his trademark.”

I Have Seen the Future will run through September 28 at the Wolfsonian. For more information, visit Wolfsonian.org.

30 Responses to “Futurist and father of streamlining Norman Bel Geddes feted in new exhibit”

He did not redesign the 1935-37 Airflows. As far as I have ever seen or read, he had no influence on the 1934 Airflows, either. Like today, all design is influenced by all other design. The Airflow influenced VW, FIAT, Simca, Tatra, and others, yet was a product of contemporary industrial design, itself influenced by many people & design.

His optimism was his best quality, coming at a time when the world sorely needed it. It is telling that few of his designs ever really were pragmatic enough to be implemented. But if you don’t step out of the box, you stay in the box.

Those automatic cars (Google) might finally be here in another twenty years; or, maybe not. They thought the world would be so futuristic twenty years after the 1939 World’s Fair and it’s taken a little longer than that. What a great story, and a great video!

Scotty, the technology for autonomous cars is mature enough to put into effect today, but states have no idea how to regulate self-driving cars. Insurance companies can’t figure them out, either, as who would get the blame in the event of an accident?

It’s safe to assume that self-driving cars are still years, if not decades, away, though we’re already beginning to see “semi-autonomous” cars at the high end of the market. Look for features like adaptive cruise control, lane departure correction and automatic braking to trickle down into more mainstream models in the coming years.

Great article… Mr. Bel Geddes indeed was a visionary. But…People have incredibly short memories. When I was dreamng of designing cars and reading every car magazine I could get my hands on as a kid, I used to think automotive development would be evolutionary and ongoing. Even, revolutionary. But alas, I find that much of it is merely cyclical.

Every few years–just about long enough for the previous generation to forget and for younger people (including those at newspapers and the internet) to suddenly think they have discovered something new… here comes driverless cars again.

Apparently a lot of people seem to be blown away by Google’s thingie. But I remember a self-driving GM car around 1958… and for several decades prior to that, GM had been alternately talking about and/or showing what were to supposedly be driverless automatic cars. Has everyone forgotten this?

Ford did the same thing. I remember seeing a driverless car exhibit at the Ford Rotunda in the 1950s.

And there was talk of driverless (or road controlled) MoPars in the 1960s.

And yesss (you knew this was coming) I actually rode in a real honest-to-goodness driverless car along with about 100 other people in 1997. In a special “HOV commuter lane” specially prepared with sensors and other electronics installed in the concrete pavement. Yes, it actually worked. I was there. I think I even still have my papers and photos from the event. GM even showed up with one of the gas turbine Firebird concept cars (in case people have forgotten–these were intended to include a driverless feature and they even show it in the old movie that GM made about the car!).

Anyway, this event was a REAL demonstration on a real public highway. Several car companies, electronics firms and government agencies participated in this program. It was called “Demo ’97″ and it took place in I-15 just north of San Diego.

One of the driverless features being pushed at the time was a rather outlandish concept called “platooning.” Which was basically groups of automatically-controlled cars clustered together a mere 3 or 4 feet apart… and cruising on the highway. The theory being that more cars could be jammed onto existing infrastructure simply by having them squeezed together in clusters. They were serious about this.

Driverless cars? It was coming… it was coming. When? Well…uhhh… pretty darned soon… just around the corner. Any time now.

But pretty soon the rhetoric, the magazine and newspaper articles and TV cameras went away. And that was that. But now? All of a dogbone sudden we’ve got what? A Google car that does what? Why, it drives itself. Wowwwwwwwwww. Isn’t that amazing???

Leon, it’s interesting (to me, anyway) how automakers are gently debuting semi-autonomous features (adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning and correction, automatic braking) in current high-end automobiles. These are billed as “driver aids,” designed to “reduce fatigue” in stressful stop-and-go driving, and automakers go out of their way to play down the significance of these features.

Unlike aircraft, which feature many redundant systems in the name of safety, automobiles (even expensive ones) are built to a price point and generally consist of components from low-bid suppliers (which, to be fair, still need to meet certain minimum specifications). I can tell you from personal experience that modern car systems can fail, and the results for the untrained driver can be… unpleasant.

This has been most recently demonstrated by the 11 crashes that GM paid off on, despite half of the fatalities not being belted, driving well over the speed limit, & having BAC levels over the limit. Apparently they all failed to stomp on the brakes at least once, or bother to turn the wheel to avoid disaster. This alone, makes a case for autonomous cars, government control of cars, traffic, destinations, etc. The trail lawyers are waiting with baited breath for this!

I don’t trust automatic systems…and I bet the pilots of the airliner which recently crashed in California, and was at least partially set on ‘automatic,’ would not trust them again…that is, of course, if they and the passengers on the plane had survived the crash.

New cars are progressively adding ‘fly-by-wire’ technology, but what if the electronics fail? If the brakes are ‘fly-by-wire,’ they can’t be applied without power. If the steering is ‘fly-by-wire,’ the driver can’t change vehicle direction without power. If the transmission quadrant selector is ‘fly-by-wire,’ gear selection cannot be made without power…even in an emergency.

God help us if the government tries to make vehicles ‘self-driving’ using ‘fly-by-wire’ technology. The only ones making money on the resulting carnage will be new car dealers replacing wrecked cars, undertakers, and ambulance chasing physicians and attorneys.

That’s a good point, Kurt. I’m guessing that everyone would point their fingers at the biggest checkbook, which would most likely be Google. I know that there are driver-less trains, but a free-roaming vehicle is a whole’nother story. I think that’s the way the industry may though, however. I only know a handful of “kids” (folks under 25) that have even bothered to get their driver’s license yet; they just don’t need one. Their parents or friends drive them or they take a bus or light rail.

i drove up to tampa to buy a old caddy from this guy ive seen his post on your blog before (geoff hacker) he had some odd one off cars he had a neat streamliner akin to some of theses designs ,i have tried to put a link so it may or may not go

And I think she’s working at a drafting board in an early scene with Jimmy Stewart from “Vertigo” as a designer or drafting tech. That’s off the top of my head…am I imagining that or is that about right?

Without some sort of vision, society doesn’t have any idea where to go. With a vision like this in hand, individual companies/governments/individuals can set goals and try to achieve them over a set period of time. Organizations develop strategies to achieve their goals. Anyone who has worked for a large, successful organization has often been pulled into strategic planning sessions to try to fine tune upper management’s goals and figure out how to implement them. I have, and will continue to facilitate strategic planning sessions (for school districts). it is harder, though, to come up with a vision like Mr. Bel Geddes’, My success with trying to get get organizations to come up with a vision, let alone 5-year goals, has not been as successful. There are not that many visionaries out there. So what if the vision doesn’t come true, or only parts do? At least we have something for which to strive.

Sincere thanks for this. I love just about everything from the world of classic cars, but it is really very refreshing to see the ‘design side’ of that world and its practitioners discussed intelligently.

Thank you Mr. Strohl for a very interesting article. In the last full paragraph, you quote Mr. Albrecht as saying that Bel Geddes was committed to the primacy of the individual and that he believed in the possibility of an utopian future. Those words especially caught my eye because, I would suspect that, without exception, when attempts have been made to create utopias, small or large, the first thing to suffer is individual rights. There have been various attempts to create small utopias in various spots around the world in human history. I think most have been religiously oriented. One of the more famous from US history is the New Harmony, Indiana commune. In recent decades, the hippies tried communal living mostly out West. Most, if not all, of the communes/utopias have failed.
Of course, the big movements for utopias have come in the 20th century with socialism/communism, fascism and Nazism. All these attempts at utopia destroyed individual rights. If individual rights are prime, then there can be no utopia as most futurists think of utopia, because utopia requires regimentation of individuals.
I don’t mean to become too political here, but it’s interesting that Geddes’ desires for improving auto transportation and city living led to thoughts of creating an utopian world. Maybe some day, all of us will be regimented into having to travel in self-driving cars. I hope not. Incidentally, utopia literally means from Latin and Greek as roughly, no such place.

My dad’s 1928E Oldsmobile had a plastic toy car, which looked a lot like the one in image 04-700, mounted with a screw to the Olds’ radiator cap. I believe the toy car had been put there by my grandfather many years before. The model was still on the cap when dad gave the Olds to a friend in the early 60s.

And, for those old enough to remember, a Porky Pig cartoon called ‘Porky’s Railroad’ had a streamliner which was fashioned after the bus seen in image 09-1200.